New study says India’s neighbourhoods are too segregated. Muslims and SCs kept out

Compared with a 0% Muslim neighbourhood, a 100% Muslim neighbourhood in the same city is 10 per cent less likely to have piped water and only half as likely to have a secondary school.

Representational image | A child holds up Indian flag during Eid al-Adha celebrations at Bandra station, Mumbai | PTI

New Delhi: In the lanes of an Indian city, two neighbourhoods can share a postcode and still live entirely different lives. On one side of an invisible boundary, water flows from taps, electricity is steady, a secondary school is within walking distance, and a clinic treats nearby families. Just a few streets away, another cluster of homes waits for electricity, lines up for water, sends children miles away for school, and lives without proper drainage.

This contrast is the central finding of a group of researchers, who studied residential segregation across 15 lakh urban and rural neighbourhoods in India.

Titled ‘Residential Segregation and Unequal Access to Local Public Services in India’, the working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research provides evidence of systemic exclusion of Muslims and Scheduled Castes.

Researchers Sam Asher (Imperial College London), Kritarth Jha (Development Data Lab), Paul Novosad (Dartmouth College), Anjali Adukia (University of Chicago), and Brandon Tan (Harvard University) used census-linked data to show that segregation directly affects who gets basic public services.

The Scheduled Caste (or Dalits) and Muslim communities together make up over 300 million people. Using enumeration blocks of roughly 500 residents as neighbourhoods, the study reveals disparities that disappear when data is viewed only at the district level—the scale commonly used for policy decisions.

“Muslim and Scheduled Caste segregation in India is high by global standards, and only slightly lower than Black-White segregation in the US. Within cities, public facilities and infrastructure are systematically less available in Muslim and Scheduled Caste neighbourhoods. Nearly all regressive allocation is across neighbourhoods within cities, at the most informal and least studied form of government. These inequalities are not visible in the aggregate data typically used for research and policy,” the study noted.

Zooming in on neighbourhoods

The study observed India’s settlement patterns both before and after Independence. In the pre-Independence era, cities often grouped neighbourhoods by occupation, which included people from different religions.

Over time, however, religious violence reshaped these patterns. Muslims from differing economic backgrounds increasingly clustered together for safety in areas that lacked public services, the study noted.

In villages, hierarchy took a spatial form. Lower-status groups frequently lived in separate hamlets, physically distant from main village facilities. That social and physical distance lasted over time.

The researchers analysed data from 2011-13, combining the Population Census, the Socioeconomic and Caste Census (SECC), and the Economic Census. They looked at 4,00,000 urban blocks in 3,500 cities and 11 lakh rural blocks in 4,00,000 villages—covering 63 per cent of India’s population.

Since religion isn’t recorded for each neighbourhood, the researchers identified Muslims using a neural network that guesses religion from names with 97 per cent accuracy, checked against census data. They tracked public services—schools, clinics, piped water, electricity, and drainage—block by block.

Earlier studies at the district level suggested SC-majority districts were improving in access to services. But looking at individual neighbourhoods tells a different story.

High levels of segregation

The study measures segregation using two standard indices.

“We focus on the dissimilarity and isolation indices, which describe the extent to which the demographic composition of a city’s neighbourhoods is different from the average demographic composition of the city,” the study stated.

In urban India, Muslim isolation is 0.49, meaning the typical Muslim lives in a neighbourhood that is 47 per cent Muslim. SC isolation is 0.43, so the typical SC individual lives in a neighbourhood that is 38 per cent SC.

Rural areas show similar patterns. About 26 per cent of Muslims live in neighbourhoods that have over 80 per cent Muslim population, compared with 16 per cent for SCs.

By global standards, these levels of segregation are high. Indian neighbourhoods are small—around 500 people per block–compared with about 4,000 in US census tracts. Even so, India’s segregation rivals Black-White segregation in the US, higher than in Brazil or Europe, and approaches White-Non-White levels in England and Wales.

Segregation is worse in large, poorer, and older cities. Areas with a history of religious violence show stronger clustering, suggesting safety plays a role. Cities with more Muslims tend to have higher Muslim segregation, similar to Black communities in the US, while the SC share in a city doesn’t predict SC segregation.

From 2001 to 2011, SC segregation in cities fell marginally by 1–3 per cent as measured by both dissimilarity and isolation.

For Muslims, who already face the lowest upward mobility among major groups, segregation is linked to stalled opportunity.

“We find a strong negative correlation between Muslim segregation and upward mobility (defined as an increase in relative educational position across generations), which is notable given that Muslims are the least upwardly mobile major social group in India,” the study stated.

These patterns are not random. Historically, untouchability confined SCs (17 per cent of the population) to low-status roles, and social barriers persist despite reservation in education and politics. Muslims, 14 per cent of the population, lack similar protections and have fallen behind educationally, the study noted. Over time, occupational neighbourhoods slowly became religious ones, and the data show that these divisions are not disappearing.

Distribution of services

The most striking finding is not just who lives where but what services follow.

The study stated that the magnitude of the disparities is large. Compared with a 0 per cent Muslim neighbourhood, a 100 per cent Muslim neighbourhood in the same city is 10 per cent less likely to have piped water and only half as likely to have a secondary school.

“For schools and clinics, facilities provided entirely by government, the disadvantage in Muslim neighbourhoods is double the disadvantage in SC neighbourhoods, echoing a consistent finding across the qualitative literature that Muslims report difficulty in getting public facilities from their representatives,” read the study.

For SC neighbourhoods, the pattern is different but equally serious. Gaps are smaller for schools and clinics but much larger for infrastructure: Piped water is 26 points lower, drainage is 28 points lower, and electricity is seven points lower. Private services do not make up for these shortages. Even after accounting for living standards, these disparities remain.

Interestingly, districts with more SC residents often have more facilities overall, as past studies like ‘The Political Economy of Public Goods: Some Evidence from India’, by Abhijit Banerjee and Rohini Somanathan (2004) showed. But at the neighbourhood level, this advantage disappears. For Muslims, district-level equality hides big gaps at the block level.

“Federal and state policies in India largely allocate funding for public services at aggregate levels (state, district, or subdistrict), while the cross-neighbourhood distribution of those services is determined through less formal local processes,” the study stated.

Even with the 73rd and 74th Amendments giving local power, states still control much in cities. Politics, brokers, and protests influence where schools, water, and drainage are built.

Muslims face bigger disadvantages in schools and clinics, while SCs are hit harder by infrastructure gaps. Distance matters—faraway schools lower girls’ enrollment, and skipped water or electricity lines leave no alternatives.

The study argued that policymakers often see districts. But inequality operates at the neighbourhood level.

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)